CRL holds more than 800,000 doctoral dissertations and Habilitationsschriften from universities outside of the U.S. and Canada. The collection was built by deposits from member libraries and exchange or depository arrangements with almost 100 universities. 

Current acquisitions and services focus on purchasing dissertations through CRL’s Demand Purchase Program, acquisitions through deposit or exchange agreements and providing members with information about open-access dissertations.

Brief description:

• Most were written in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, but dates range from 1800 to the present.
• Most are from countries in Western Europe, such as Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.  Many are from other countries in Europe and Latin America, South America, and Africa.
• More than 80 languages are represented in the collection. The breakdown of languages is: 66 percent German; 16 percent French; 6 percent English; 2 percent Dutch; 1 percent Latin and Swedish; and less than 1 percent for other languages.

• Contains about 120 dissertations by nobel laureates and numerous other notable scholars. All of the noble laureates dissertations are digitized and a sizable portion of the notable scholars dissertations are digitized as well. 

Finding dissertations in the CRL collection:

All dissertations can be most easily searched in the dissertation scope of the CRL catalog, which has drop-down searches for country and university.  Some sample university searches include:

• Dissertations from the Université de Lausanne
• Dissertations from the University of Helsinki

Digitized or electronic dissertations:

CRL’s digitization-on-demand service has digitized about 2,500 dissertations from CRL’s collection.  The number of dissertations digitized from the collection continues to grow and can be searched via CRL’s catalog e-resources scope. 

Increasingly, universities are providing electronic access to their current or recent dissertations through their institutional repositories and other open access archives. Most universities have links from their library pages to their institutional or regional repository. Other sources for finding electronic dissertation repositories are listed below:

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Acess Repositories)

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)

Repository66.org: Google maps mashup showing the location of repositories worldwide.  Data provided by ROAR and OpenDOAR.

In addition, the British Libraries has instituted a digitization on demand service, ETHOS, for Ph.D. theses produced by UK educational institutions.